Date: 2024-12-26 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00005429
Initiatives
The Enrich List
Comments about the Enrich List (En)Rich List ... Celebrating a wealth of inspirational individuals whose collective contributions enrich paths to sustainable futures.
Burgess COMMENTARY
Peter Burgess
-
March 20, 2012 at 16:58
-
helen nearing
author, artist, homesteader, and co-creator of the 1940′s back to the land movement in the USA.
scott nearing
radical economist, educator, writer, political activist, homesteader, and advocate of simple living.-
March 20, 2012 at 18:44
-
Thanks Manuel – we agree! Helen and Scott are in our honourable mentions list: http://enrichlist.org/honorable-mentions/.
Donnie and the team
-
March 21, 2012 at 06:18
-
Agreed!
-
-
March 21, 2012 at 09:42
-
Search: Marx
‘Sorry, but no results were found.’
Ho ho.
Also good to see your post-growth world will not be post-patriarchal. Do you not think these social formations might be connected?-
-
I agree very much with your observation that this, and all too often other lists, display a serious bias of male representation.
-
March 23, 2012 at 04:13
-
-
March 21, 2012 at 11:15
-
You might need to do some further reading on the Dalai Lama.
-
March 22, 2012 at 01:52
-
Here are some more inspirational individuals whose contributions enrich paths to sustainable futures:
Sunita Narain
Harish Hande
Jeremy Rifkin
Zhao Zhong
Jayati Ghosh
Satish Kumar
Zhengrong Shi
Richard Branson
Paul Polak
Marty Chan
Prigi Arisandi
Zhang Yue
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Anote Tong
Bunker Roy
Abdul Aziz bin Ali Al-Nuaimi
Simon Maxwell
Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins
Gunter Pauli
Chandran Nair
Ellen MacArthur
Michael Liebreich
Achim Steiner
David Hasanat-
March 25, 2012 at 01:28
-
Thanks Charles. A real mix of people in there, many of whom are unfamiliar to us!
Gunter Pauli will be in Sydney early April.
Donnie and the Post Growth team
-
-
You can find many of these people at the Making It magazine web site: http://www.makingitmagazine.net – they have contributed articles to the magazine which deals with global industrial development issues.
-
-
April 5, 2012 at 06:40
-
Arnie Schwarzenegger? With his 12 Hummers??
-
-
March 24, 2012 at 17:57
-
They might want to add Allan Savory to the list. His work on restoring grasslands is our surest hope of mitigating global warming, desertification and famine.
-
March 26, 2012 at 16:12
-
It’s a great effort, really, but flawed it seems. I can’t really explain it but I personally know many of the people on the first couple pages, who nearly all share a strange belief. With the exception of Ken Boulding (who learned about it as a problem from JM Keynes and wrote on it for years) they all dismiss the connection between societal policies for maximizing rates of growing investment savings and the tendency of the economies to ever accelerate their rates of depleting everything usable on earth. I’ve been scratching my head between efforts to write about that for years and years. Why is there a near blanket denial of the most visible direct cause of the problem??
-
March 28, 2012 at 13:27
-
Jessie,
I wouldn’t say that many of these people on the first page dismiss this concept. In fact, for many this is part of the central acceptance that you cannot continue to grow the economy on a finite planet. Maximizing rates of growing investment savings is right up there with belief that we can grow our economy forever. A post growth (or steady state) economy cannot function that way. Once you remove the growth imperative you have to remove compound interest from the monetary system if you want it to have any connection to natural stocks. You also have to introduce policies that protect the natural wealth of our planet and maintain a sustainable scale (Herman Daly) of our economy, allowing for those ecosystem services to regenerate the amount we use every cycle.
Though he’s not on the list, Freddrick Soddy did influence many you are, and said: “you cannot permanently pit an absurd human convention, such as the spontaneous increment of debt [compound interest] against the natural law of the spontaneous decrement of wealth [entropy].” Debt of course has to be connected to savings, at least in a more sustainable monetary system. Again, Herman Daly is a proponent of this idea.
Herman Daly’s view on compound interest: “debt can endure forever; wealth cannot, because its physical dimension is subject to the destructive force of entropy…the positive feedback of compound interest must be offset by counteracting forces of debt repudiation, such as inflation, bankruptcy, or confiscatory taxation, all of which breed violence.”
Additionally, you are talking about savings of monetary “wealth,” of which currently its value is (a) arbitrary and (b) not necessarily reliant on natural stocks. The mear concept of inflation and compound interest show that while we may value certain things based on natural stocks, the value of our money is disconnected from them. A more adequate form of money would be base on time, not debt or gold, and would not relay on compound interest to accelerate value loss.
Cheers,
Joshua-
-
Joshua, Your comment helps me clarify my complaint. The contradiction I’m trying to point out is about how eloquent people are about the limits of the economy’s use of the earth, but at the same time remain peculiarly silent about our use of money to make endless multiplying requests for resources to be consumed for providing us services.
What’s your take on that cockeyed disconnection? Wouldn’t it seem to utterly disable well meaning efforts to constrain resource use, if at the same time you are “stabilizing” ever multiplying resource demand?
Ever multiplying resource demand is what naturally happens when the basic principles of government and society include stabilizing rates of profit so people can use their investments to multiply their investments. Why that’s among the central purposes of government seems to be that it’s what literally everyone wants, to have their idle savings produce a multiplying “free lunch”. So I think government is just doing what everyone asks for. You’d think the people who noticed the dire circumstance that ever growing resource use causes would also notice it was connected to ever growing demand for resource use.
It appears Keynes was actually the first person who *did* notice the connection. So if the “enrich list” were to be of people who successfully brought attention to the real dilemma facing us, our approaching a natural limit of money in a society entirely organized around multiplying money, it would contain only Keynes and Boulding.
-
March 28, 2012 at 18:32
-
Jessie,
There certainly are people who seem to want to ‘have their cake and eat it too’–material affluence AND sustainability for all. As you point out, this isn’t possible. Post Growth Institute (PGI) recognizes this. While not always directly addressing the core tenets of the unsustainable financial system (or using different language when they do), the people celebrated in the (En)Rich List are all in some way or another creating alternatives to a society organized around multiplying (and concentrating) money. Remember that our List was created as a parody of the values touted by the Forbes parade of billionaires, not a magic-bullet ‘solution’ or the last word in the complexities of the financial and ecological crisis.
You might be interested in one of Post Growth’s projects, Free Money Day, designed to get people thinking about our relationships to money and how it dictates the terms of our lives. Questioning money as the basis of value is one of the reasons PGI exists.
Thanks,
Ingrid and the Post Growth team-
-
Ingrid, It most certainly does throw me into a strange and uncomfortable position to so strongly support the purposes and values of the Post Growth community, and also have to point out a problem. As a physicist I appear to stand on much firmer ground than our near societal unanimity for avoiding the most emotionally sensitive part of our problem.
I study what makes natural systems succeed or fail, letting them grow to smoothly stabilize or to collapse themselves in exhaustion along with their environments. They either change strategy while still vigorously expanding, to make peace with themselves and their worlds, or they rip themselves and their part of the world apart. As far as I know J M Keynes was the first to discover that, so evidently wildly misunderstood by the economics profession.
We steer our economy using money, managing our resource uses by reinvesting our resource profits. It’s a “neat trick” that lets us continually multiply our control of our environment and consume everything usable on earth as fast as human creativity makes it possible, ~3% a year faster and faster. If you sense a problem with that central organizing purpose of our larger society and “opt out”…, it’s indeed a courageous personal step. But it doesn’t save your world. The whole system has to “come home” to living at peace with the earth, or the parts will have no whole to be part of.
There may be many different ways to say it, but there is only one available means of doing it. That’s for the system as a whole to change how it manages its profits. Rather than to use profits to multiply our new form of life to oblivion, it would need to apply the profits to stabilizing our radically new way of life on earth, and our radically new relationships with the rest of nature.
Everyone in the no-growth community is surely alluding to that, one way or another. So far all the popular proposed strategies seem carefully designed to avoid bringing up the need to persuade mainstream global society to stop using its profits to multiply profits, now that it has become delusional. I think there’s no better time to point out such things than when you happen to see them, understanding that the real cause is that we live in a natural world, and in this case, full of surprises. The end of growth is either “coming home” or a leap into nature’s pile of discards.
-
-
-
-
-
March 26, 2012 at 17:57
-
Congratulations to Donnie and team on a brilliant source of inspiration!
Best of luck,
Tamir -
March 26, 2012 at 19:53
-
I,m sorry Donny but I can’t find Martin Luther King even in the honourable mention and if you could please put Vincent Lingiari, 1966 “We want to live on our land, our way” if I put this on my facebook without them it would be very disrespectful, I know you would agree that it was an innocent oversight and hope to correct. Cheers
-
March 27, 2012 at 07:16
-
Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians is missing in this terrific lineup of people who are changing the world and need our support. Her work for world water protection as a human right and her work for social justice regarding environmental and indigenous rights brings a lot of us onside to do our best to work for a better world for all.
-
April 1, 2012 at 11:22
-
Thank you for this list, which is so incredibly much more inspiring and liberating than the Forbes list! But I wonder about people who live some of the paths described by people on this list – we are used to celebrating influential figures in the First World, but what about more who are less First World academic/professional types or admired by same? Those who live a difference for the world’s people who will never know who some of these figures are?
-
April 3, 2012 at 02:06
-
Yes, an interesting listing of influential people. I was pleased to see an entry on Michel Bauwens who has been doing marvellous work for p2p interaction.I have contributed four “articles” to his site, and they may be of interest here.
http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics
http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Multi-Dimensional_Science
http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Universal_Debating_Project
http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Improvised_Voice_Instrumental_Music
-
April 4, 2012 at 19:59
-
Interesting list. Some names I’d consider:
José María Arizmendiarrieta, founder of the Mondragon Corporation, one of the largest networks of worker-owned and controlled cooperatives, a model for many around the world.
Elinor Ostrom, Noble winner for her work on the governance of commons
Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, and catalyst of the free and open source software movement
-
April 5, 2012 at 04:42
-
Nice to see Amartya Sen at no. 71. I was expecting Thomas Edison too.
-
September 19, 2012 at 09:29
-
the list is fine.but how can rank mahathmagandi as rank 9 and vandanasiva as 7.this is not agreeable.the ideology of gandhi is everlasting. he is the father of our nation india. vanadana siva is just an activist. comparing these two person vandana is far away from gandhi.
-
March 5, 2013 at 04:17
-
Would probably be best to left deceased people (s.a. Gandhi) out of the list. I don’t think Forbes lists dead people either, do they? (got here via this tweet: http://twitter.com/postgrowth/status/308913351847714816)
Interesting unknown names – will have a look.
-
March 29, 2012 at 12:22
-
-
Great, I hope I can find a way to get you to appreciate the natural forces I’m trying to describe. I would agree with just about everything you say here, actually. What I pointed out is not so much intended as offering a better strategy, but one that is unavoidably essential to include with the others. The other more socially motivated efforts are not wrong in any way, except for hoping they can be enough do the job without engaging the physical systems of nature.
Yes, my short description might have sounded like a “top down” model. When natural growth systems transition from systematic growth to systematic maturation it appears as if all the parts are acting in unison. Nature doesn’t even have a top-down method she can use, in any case. So, finding “the idea that works” emerging more or less everywhere at once is more how it usually looks. The pieces all just seem to fall together, like we observed at the end of the Soviet Union and in the recent Arab spring, or other great moments of consensus change.
For humanity to do what it never has done in unison before may or may not require our getting to a point of greater desperation than everyone presently feels. I expect you realize our continued failure to find a common idea of what to do will certainly keep taking us toward ever more desperate circumstances, though. Discovering that moment of acting as a whole for the first time could either then happen so smoothly as if by design, or like a kind of birth process, that appears rather painful and messy with the new organism somehow emerging bewildered but unscathed.
-
April 2, 2012 at 20:43
-
To Jessie and Joshua, and Ingrid and the whole Post-Growth team,
THANK YOU for letting the above comment stream happen. I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to scroll to a comments section and see actual discourse on this most central of issues. I applaud the post-growth team and their creation of this imperfect, incomplete, discourse-inspiring list – thank you for your positive and embracing attitude toward all the comments that I’m sure you knew you’d receive. It is my belief that the ability to engage in uncensored and effective discourse will be invaluable in navigating the desperate times we find ourselves in, as the need to understand and resolve increasingly complex and divergent information from all aspects of the human experience grows. Jessie – I found your last paragraph in the above comment, describing the possibility of humanity acting as a whole, particularly inspiring. I don’t know who you are, but can I quote you nonetheless? -
April 3, 2012 at 09:28
-
Thanks, Taya! Encouragement much appreciated. Please keep following us and repost the (En)Rich List wherever you can.
-
-
Taya,
I’m really am a physicist, one who studies how complex natural systems quite frequently change directions of development in unison, to create the familiar behaviors of things that are, or act like, self-directed organisms. That no system on earth actually has a top-down control method for its unified behaviors, is one of the things you eventually find while studying them. I wrote a new short discussion of how to begin using my way of studying them, as a method of closely observing their behaviors. Ingrid recently asked of I had one, and so I thought I’d try a new approach, while also collecting links to some of my old ones.fyi – “Steps to a natural systems view”
http://www.synapse9.com/signals/2012/03/31/steps-to-a-natural-systems-view/